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The Pioneers (Penguin Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Penguin Classics
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Our Price: $9.60
You Save: $ 2.40 ( 20% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Average Customer Rating:
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The Pioneers (Penguin Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.2
EAN: 9780140390070
ISBN: 0140390073
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 480
Publication Date: 1988-06-06
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.2
EAN: 9780140390070
ISBN: 0140390073
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 480
Publication Date: 1988-06-06
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Studio: Penguin Classics
Editorial Review of The Pioneers (Penguin Classics)
The first of the five Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers is perhaps the most realistic and beautiful of the series. Drawing on his own experiences, Cooper brilliantly describes Frontier life, providing a fascinating backdrop to the real heart of the novel--the competing claims to land
ownership of Native Americans and settlers. This edition follows the publication of The Last of the Mohicans in the World's Classics series and uses the standard text approved by the Modern Language Association.
ownership of Native Americans and settlers. This edition follows the publication of The Last of the Mohicans in the World's Classics series and uses the standard text approved by the Modern Language Association.
Customer Reviews of The Pioneers (Penguin Classics)
Customer Rating: 
Review Summary: Written for his own pleasure, not yours.
Review: This is, I believe, James Fenimore Cooper's first published work. Before his writings, there were really no great American writers writing stories based in America. Therefore, Cooper is often considered the father of "American" American literature. His writings helped shape the image people all over the world had of America.
To me, this novel was a disappointment. I was hoping for something a bit more gripping and exciting, but what I found was a sort of feel-good, worry-free tour of a small town in upstate New York with amusing, but rather innocent and uninspiring characters. While there are a number of scenes that present the characters with real and substantial dangers, the way they are written and the manner in which Cooper's characters are dealt with throughout the book, leaves the reader with little doubt that things will turn out fine in the end. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I just couldn't really get excited about this story.
This book introduces Cooper's most famous character, Leatherstocking, who appears in numerous other Cooper tales (The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, and The Prarie). In THE PIONEERS, Natty Bumppo is already an old man that really only wishes to live out his life in peace. His character and motivations remain somewhat of a mystery throughout this book, and it is not clear whether Cooper felt him to be a character that he would write more about all along or only after this book was published.
In Cooper's introduction to this book, he really kind of bashes the story, claiming that he wrote it for himself and didn't really consider the importance of a broad appeal for his audience. The setting and characters represent the town he grew up in (the town his father founded) and his own family and friends. This admission together with the undeniably slow first half of the book may have helped sour my view of the whole. While some of the characters, notably Elizabeth Temple and Oliver Edwards, are extremely likable and well-written, they just weren't enough to make me love this story.
I like some of the things about Cooper's writing, so I'll give his other books a try, but I wasn't too impressed with this one.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A short review of James Fenimore Cooper the Pioneers
Review: Classical Cooper work, it can't be beat. The state of New York is expanding, and the make up of the classes is expounded on. This is pioneer budding New York with the wilderness slowly turning its great land holdings into a people orientended land. This is the land our forefathers knew.
The story isn't just about land, its about the people that inhabit it. Our hero is a Long Rifle. A man that was part of the landscape long before people were settling it. The times are changing and he has taken a young man under his wing, one with his own abilities. They both hold a secret known only to themselves.
The cast of characters besides our two hero's, include the Squire, the Dr., the Squires black male servent, and of course a young woman, and many others. From the gracious living of the upper class, to the world of our heros, which is the forest, you won't want to put this book down. The events and lives of people in that century, cutting into what had been wilderness is covered, as only Cooper can.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: When preachers enter the wilderness, game grows scarce.
Review: It is Christmas eve 1793 in Central New York's pioneer village of Templeton. Although only seven years old, Templeton boasts of 50 structures, two lawyers, a doctor and a sampling of tradesmen and farmers. The town sits at the lower end of Lake Otsego and timber abounds, though the recent settlers cut it down without a thought for fuel and farmland as if it would last forever.
Most of the native American Indians have moved west, having sold their land to the King, who then lost it to the successful American rebels. But title to local lands flows from an old Royal grant. And there is a shadow on the claim of the town's richest man, Judge Marmaduke Temple to own the many thousands of acres that he is systematically selling off to immigrants of many ethnic backgrounds.
Before the Revolution the Judge had a school friend, son and heir of a well off English military officer, Major Oliver Effingham. This friendship made the Judge's fortune. Came the war, however, and the friends fought for opposite sides. The Judge's side won and the Englishman lost all. The Judge then bought up his onetime friend's lands at auction. Was this greed or deliberate protection of his friend's interests? Read the novel to the end through many mysteries and twists and find out! The Major, who lived in Connecticut, disappeared in the fog of revolutionary war, leaving a son Edward and grandson Edward Oliver.
A "mysterious" young stranger arrives on the lake. He calls himself Oliver Edwards and he lives in a cabin with another white man, Natty Bumppo, a man of 67 and an even older native American Christian called variously Chingachgook, Big Serpent and Indian John. On Christmas eve, this trio is out hunting a deer. Judge Temple in a sleigh is driving his teenage daughter home from years of study in New York City. The Judge shoots at a fleeing deer, as do Natty and Oliver. Oliver's shot kills the beast, the judge's misses, hitting Oliver in the shoulder. But when the sleigh's team bolts, Oliver saves the party from danger, including his beautiful daughter Elizabeth.
Has this plot beginning caught your attention? Then read on. For some initially unclear reason relating to land title, young Oliver obviously hates the judge who hires him as secretary. Later Natty and Indian John kill a deer out of season. The law puts Natty in the stocks and then in jail. But he escapes with the help of his two friends. And through thick and thin affection grows between Oliver and Elizabeth.
The novel raises questions about who owns America: God, the Indians, the Dutch, the English, friends of the Indians like Natty? Civilization arrives in the form of Templeton (today's Coopertown where author James Fenimore grew up). Civilization brings law and order but also personal power, so much that it can be abused. In the end injustice forces Natty to leave and head for the western prairies. He has seen too many changes, too much loss of space to stores and churches. He says to Reverend Mr Grant:
"... I see, times be altering in these mountains from what they was thirty years ago. ... Heigh-ho! I never know'd preaching come into a settlement but it made game scarce, and raised the price of gunpowder." (Ch. XII)
But readers who trust in God are rewarded when at least partial justice is done by story's end to everyone's claims to properties and rights.
THE PIONEERS did for tourism to the Finger Lakes of New York what Sir Walter Scott's LADY OF THE LAKE did for the Trossachs of Scotland. Fenimore Cooper's novel is a salute to old multinnational New York just before Puritans wandering in from Massachusetts put their homogenizing stamp on an easier going culture. -OOO-
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Growing Pains of a Nation
Review: I really enjoyed this book and how it portrayed the growing pains of this great country. Natty Bumppo is one of my favorite literary characters! He's not afraid to stand up for what he sees is right and when he understands that he cannot maintain his way of life where he is, he decides his own fate. He is noble yet feisty. A true romantic hero!
Yes, this novel does require patience from the reader (which most classic works of literature do), but for me, the payoff was worth it. It's not my favorite Leatherstocking Tale, but I do recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A spirited, funny, and occasionally melodramatic novel about the clash between civilization and individualism
Review: In "The Pioneers," Natty Bumppo, the adventurous hero of "The Last of the Mohicans," is 70 years old and has become disenchanted with a young American republic whose rapidly advancing population and government encroaches upon the free-spirited life to which he is accustomed. Natty's run-down shack is allowed to stand at the pleasure of Judge Marmaduke Temple, a well-meaning yet stern patriarch who received a vast land grant at the end of the Revolutionary War and who builds a town whose existence depends on the rule of law and order. The plot of the novel flows from the inevitable conflict between the advance of this new civilization and the claims of the rugged individualists who can barely abide its rules.
In his Preface, Cooper warns the reader that the book contains none of "the strong excitement that is produced by battles and murders"; unlike his later books, this is no adventure story. Nevertheless, he still manages to animate his novel with daring heroics, melodramatic chase scenes, and daring rescues. Also adding suspense are the appearance of a mysterious young man (whose identity is fairly obvious, but no matter) and the secrecy of what Bumppo is hiding in his cabin.
After several briskly told opening chapters, about two nearly disastrous accidents, Cooper slows things down a bit, describing the Judge's household, the townsfolk, and their churchgoing and barhopping ways. Because the Judge's relatives and friends range from blustering pretenders to crusty old-timers, these sections are filled with unexpected humor. (But one does have to wade through an awful lot of prose about the weather.) Fortunately the last half of the book is fast-paced, including a hilarious yet oddly electrifying court trial and jail rescue.
Some readers have been tempted to interpret Natty Bumppo as a primitive Howard Roark figure--an early libertarian struggling against the capriciousness of government overreach. There's a bit of truth in this thematic approach, but such a portrait doesn't take into account the novel's earnest environmentalism (a topic on which both Bumppo and Temple form an uneasy alliance). And the characters of the Judge and his daughter are far too nuanced, likeable, and honest to cast them as enemies of limited government and rugged individualism. Instead, Cooper paints an early American landscape that is sympathetic to both sides--to both the pioneers of Temple's new town and to those who, like Bumppo, came before them and paved the way.
Review Summary: Written for his own pleasure, not yours.
Review: This is, I believe, James Fenimore Cooper's first published work. Before his writings, there were really no great American writers writing stories based in America. Therefore, Cooper is often considered the father of "American" American literature. His writings helped shape the image people all over the world had of America.
To me, this novel was a disappointment. I was hoping for something a bit more gripping and exciting, but what I found was a sort of feel-good, worry-free tour of a small town in upstate New York with amusing, but rather innocent and uninspiring characters. While there are a number of scenes that present the characters with real and substantial dangers, the way they are written and the manner in which Cooper's characters are dealt with throughout the book, leaves the reader with little doubt that things will turn out fine in the end. Maybe I'm being too critical, but I just couldn't really get excited about this story.
This book introduces Cooper's most famous character, Leatherstocking, who appears in numerous other Cooper tales (The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder, and The Prarie). In THE PIONEERS, Natty Bumppo is already an old man that really only wishes to live out his life in peace. His character and motivations remain somewhat of a mystery throughout this book, and it is not clear whether Cooper felt him to be a character that he would write more about all along or only after this book was published.
In Cooper's introduction to this book, he really kind of bashes the story, claiming that he wrote it for himself and didn't really consider the importance of a broad appeal for his audience. The setting and characters represent the town he grew up in (the town his father founded) and his own family and friends. This admission together with the undeniably slow first half of the book may have helped sour my view of the whole. While some of the characters, notably Elizabeth Temple and Oliver Edwards, are extremely likable and well-written, they just weren't enough to make me love this story.
I like some of the things about Cooper's writing, so I'll give his other books a try, but I wasn't too impressed with this one.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A short review of James Fenimore Cooper the Pioneers
Review: Classical Cooper work, it can't be beat. The state of New York is expanding, and the make up of the classes is expounded on. This is pioneer budding New York with the wilderness slowly turning its great land holdings into a people orientended land. This is the land our forefathers knew.
The story isn't just about land, its about the people that inhabit it. Our hero is a Long Rifle. A man that was part of the landscape long before people were settling it. The times are changing and he has taken a young man under his wing, one with his own abilities. They both hold a secret known only to themselves.
The cast of characters besides our two hero's, include the Squire, the Dr., the Squires black male servent, and of course a young woman, and many others. From the gracious living of the upper class, to the world of our heros, which is the forest, you won't want to put this book down. The events and lives of people in that century, cutting into what had been wilderness is covered, as only Cooper can.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: When preachers enter the wilderness, game grows scarce.
Review: It is Christmas eve 1793 in Central New York's pioneer village of Templeton. Although only seven years old, Templeton boasts of 50 structures, two lawyers, a doctor and a sampling of tradesmen and farmers. The town sits at the lower end of Lake Otsego and timber abounds, though the recent settlers cut it down without a thought for fuel and farmland as if it would last forever.
Most of the native American Indians have moved west, having sold their land to the King, who then lost it to the successful American rebels. But title to local lands flows from an old Royal grant. And there is a shadow on the claim of the town's richest man, Judge Marmaduke Temple to own the many thousands of acres that he is systematically selling off to immigrants of many ethnic backgrounds.
Before the Revolution the Judge had a school friend, son and heir of a well off English military officer, Major Oliver Effingham. This friendship made the Judge's fortune. Came the war, however, and the friends fought for opposite sides. The Judge's side won and the Englishman lost all. The Judge then bought up his onetime friend's lands at auction. Was this greed or deliberate protection of his friend's interests? Read the novel to the end through many mysteries and twists and find out! The Major, who lived in Connecticut, disappeared in the fog of revolutionary war, leaving a son Edward and grandson Edward Oliver.
A "mysterious" young stranger arrives on the lake. He calls himself Oliver Edwards and he lives in a cabin with another white man, Natty Bumppo, a man of 67 and an even older native American Christian called variously Chingachgook, Big Serpent and Indian John. On Christmas eve, this trio is out hunting a deer. Judge Temple in a sleigh is driving his teenage daughter home from years of study in New York City. The Judge shoots at a fleeing deer, as do Natty and Oliver. Oliver's shot kills the beast, the judge's misses, hitting Oliver in the shoulder. But when the sleigh's team bolts, Oliver saves the party from danger, including his beautiful daughter Elizabeth.
Has this plot beginning caught your attention? Then read on. For some initially unclear reason relating to land title, young Oliver obviously hates the judge who hires him as secretary. Later Natty and Indian John kill a deer out of season. The law puts Natty in the stocks and then in jail. But he escapes with the help of his two friends. And through thick and thin affection grows between Oliver and Elizabeth.
The novel raises questions about who owns America: God, the Indians, the Dutch, the English, friends of the Indians like Natty? Civilization arrives in the form of Templeton (today's Coopertown where author James Fenimore grew up). Civilization brings law and order but also personal power, so much that it can be abused. In the end injustice forces Natty to leave and head for the western prairies. He has seen too many changes, too much loss of space to stores and churches. He says to Reverend Mr Grant:
"... I see, times be altering in these mountains from what they was thirty years ago. ... Heigh-ho! I never know'd preaching come into a settlement but it made game scarce, and raised the price of gunpowder." (Ch. XII)
But readers who trust in God are rewarded when at least partial justice is done by story's end to everyone's claims to properties and rights.
THE PIONEERS did for tourism to the Finger Lakes of New York what Sir Walter Scott's LADY OF THE LAKE did for the Trossachs of Scotland. Fenimore Cooper's novel is a salute to old multinnational New York just before Puritans wandering in from Massachusetts put their homogenizing stamp on an easier going culture. -OOO-
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Growing Pains of a Nation
Review: I really enjoyed this book and how it portrayed the growing pains of this great country. Natty Bumppo is one of my favorite literary characters! He's not afraid to stand up for what he sees is right and when he understands that he cannot maintain his way of life where he is, he decides his own fate. He is noble yet feisty. A true romantic hero!
Yes, this novel does require patience from the reader (which most classic works of literature do), but for me, the payoff was worth it. It's not my favorite Leatherstocking Tale, but I do recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A spirited, funny, and occasionally melodramatic novel about the clash between civilization and individualism
Review: In "The Pioneers," Natty Bumppo, the adventurous hero of "The Last of the Mohicans," is 70 years old and has become disenchanted with a young American republic whose rapidly advancing population and government encroaches upon the free-spirited life to which he is accustomed. Natty's run-down shack is allowed to stand at the pleasure of Judge Marmaduke Temple, a well-meaning yet stern patriarch who received a vast land grant at the end of the Revolutionary War and who builds a town whose existence depends on the rule of law and order. The plot of the novel flows from the inevitable conflict between the advance of this new civilization and the claims of the rugged individualists who can barely abide its rules.
In his Preface, Cooper warns the reader that the book contains none of "the strong excitement that is produced by battles and murders"; unlike his later books, this is no adventure story. Nevertheless, he still manages to animate his novel with daring heroics, melodramatic chase scenes, and daring rescues. Also adding suspense are the appearance of a mysterious young man (whose identity is fairly obvious, but no matter) and the secrecy of what Bumppo is hiding in his cabin.
After several briskly told opening chapters, about two nearly disastrous accidents, Cooper slows things down a bit, describing the Judge's household, the townsfolk, and their churchgoing and barhopping ways. Because the Judge's relatives and friends range from blustering pretenders to crusty old-timers, these sections are filled with unexpected humor. (But one does have to wade through an awful lot of prose about the weather.) Fortunately the last half of the book is fast-paced, including a hilarious yet oddly electrifying court trial and jail rescue.
Some readers have been tempted to interpret Natty Bumppo as a primitive Howard Roark figure--an early libertarian struggling against the capriciousness of government overreach. There's a bit of truth in this thematic approach, but such a portrait doesn't take into account the novel's earnest environmentalism (a topic on which both Bumppo and Temple form an uneasy alliance). And the characters of the Judge and his daughter are far too nuanced, likeable, and honest to cast them as enemies of limited government and rugged individualism. Instead, Cooper paints an early American landscape that is sympathetic to both sides--to both the pioneers of Temple's new town and to those who, like Bumppo, came before them and paved the way.